1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a mobile terminal, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for controlling a playback speed of an animation message in a mobile terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
A smartphone is a mobile terminal (e.g. a Personal Communication Service (PCS) device and a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)), and may also provide data communication functions (e.g., schedule management, facsimile communication, Internet, etc.), in addition to functions of a mobile terminal (e.g., a voice call-related functions, etc.). Herein, the term “mobile terminal” refers to any of a variety of devices including traditional mobile terminals as a well as smartphones, for ease of description.
Users may use a mobile terminal to transmit and receive a message that includes a picture or an emoticon (e.g., a Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) message, a short text message such as an Short Message Service (SMS) message, etc.).
Recently, mobile terminals have also enabled users to create an animation message by adding content including icons, emoticons, figures, character images, etc. and/or by writing a text through handwriting. Mobile terminals can receive and transmit created animation messages, and may display the created animation messages on the mobile terminals.
More specifically, users may create an animation message by writing a textual message on a touch screen with a finger or tools (e.g., a pen, etc.), and by adding icons, emoticons, figures, character images, etc. to the message. When the animation message is created, the mobile terminal may process locations of sampled points on the touch screen, and may store metadata. Subsequently, during the playback of the animation message, a mobile terminal may sequentially display the stored points at regular intervals on a screen. Therefore, users can experience a vivid sensation, as it appears that the animation message is being written by a person while the animation message is played back through an animation message application.
However, when a conventional animation message is played back, many objects input by a user to create content, for example, texts, drawings, figures, handwritten messages, character images, icons, emoticons, and the like, may be displayed in an order that the objects are input or in a random order, as opposed to being simultaneously displayed on the screen. More specifically, frames associated with the objects included in the content may be sequentially or randomly configured and thus, a playback speed of the conventional animation message may be arbitrarily determined, without regard of properties of the content when the animation message is played back.
For example, a conventional method of playing back an object-based animation message may include determining a reference time interval corresponding to a display time per object, calculating a total number of objects included in the animation message, and playing back the objects at the reference time intervals. Another conventional method of playing back a frame-based animation message may include determining a reference time interval corresponding to a display time per frame, calculating a total number of frames included in the animation message, and playing back the frames at the reference time intervals. Another conventional animation message playback method may include determining a reference time interval and a user-preferred speed, and calculating a number of iterations based on the user-preferred speed. The number of iterations may be obtained by dividing the user-preferred speed by the reference time interval. Subsequently, a total number of frames included in the animation message and an amount of data may be calculated. The amount of data may be obtained by dividing the total number of frames by the number of iterations. The frames of the calculated amount of data may be played back at the reference time intervals.
A conventional animation message playback method may display the animation message to a receiver based on a speed at which a sender created the animation message. In this example, the receiver may become bored when the animation message has a large data capacity or includes many objects. When an animation message that includes a large amount of content is displayed at a high speed, in order to quickly check the message. However, such a quick checking may degrade the sense of realism perceived by a user viewing the message played back at a high speed.